This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 10th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As Union Influence continues to Wayne, public sector unions have found creative, if dubious ways to retain members.

Ken Girardin of the Empire Center in New York details the myriad ways unions

continue to work to retain public sector workers, even after a string of court decisions have told workers in no

uncertain terms that they're free to walk away.

We've seen a lot of different ways that in the wake of various court rulings, most notably the Janus decision, how unions have

found clever, I guess, respectable ways in a sense like you respect the you hate the

player not the game I guess but they have taken creative ways to keep members who otherwise would be tempted to walk away.

Or explicitly, maybe they want to walk away. What have you seen?

Every year about 1 million people get hired to work for a state or local government

in a workplace where employees have unionized. We're talking about teachers, police

officers, graduate students, nurses. These new employees have the option to join a

union. It is not mandatory. What my colleagues at the

Empire Center and I are finding is two big problems happening. First, by and large employees aren't being told about their right to choose.

Their bosses, the employers are scared of being called anti-union or facing sanctions if they're seen as doing anything

undermining the union. So they're afraid to tell people they have a right to choose,

even if it means reading a section of state law to them.

That means employees, new to the job, are getting a very one-sided view of things from a public employee union,

which is a lot like a business concern, when they are hired.

The second part about this, the newer problem, is that employers are

agreeing in the union contract to leave the room during union orientation. No witnesses. We've seen this in New York, California,

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